The January 6 Capitol breach has been called an attempted coup; it was not a coup, but a coup by the extreme left is possible in the future. Before I make my case, a few points should be made about January 6. David Harsany pointed out in the New York Post that the J6 protestors had no plan; a study at Harvard showed that most Jan 6 protestors did not believe they were overruling democracy, but preserving it:
The documents show that Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline, but in imminent, existential danger… This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to DC from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.
The first question to ask if speculating on an hypothetical leftist coup is this: Are there a substantial number of people in the United States who would like to see an anti-American revolution?
It’s hard to quantify, but there’s certainly a sizable population, made evident by the noise they make.
During the Antifa riots, apart from the violence, there were chants: “No border, no wall, no USA at all.”
During the recent pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses and elsewhere, anti-American views were overt: For instance, students at the University of Michigan participating in the protests were given pamphlets titled “10 anarchist theses on Palestine solidarity in the United States,” which included a page that stated, “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.” The slogan “Death to America” was chanted in nearby Dearborn, Michigan, during a rally on the last Friday of Ramadan.
A former Muslim, Sana Ebrahimi warned that many Muslims coming into the West do not share our values, and “they do not play around.”
The red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists makes some kind of sense:
[T]he two movements are building a Common Front against the United States and its allies. … Both radical Leftists and Islamists have utilized the master frame of anti-globalization/anti-capitalism and the master frame of anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism to elicit support from the widest possible range of people.
(See also here.)
But surely there are not enough armed opponents of the U.S. within the U.S. to mount a coup?
There may be. Gordon Chang has been warning of the makings of a Chinese army in the U.S. (in 2023, more than 30,000 military-aged individuals from China have entered) and says this:
These were Chinese migrants, who had come into the U.S., they were here for less than three weeks, and what were they doing? They were taking target practice with semi-automatic rifles. Now if you’re a migrant coming into the U.S. with just a backpack, you’re probably thinking about, ‘I need a place to live, I need to eat,’ maybe get a job. You don’t think about sharpening your skills to kill Americans.
National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd also expressed concern and pointed out that “We know that the Chinese have huge gangs here in the United States, and they control certain parts of our country.”
China is just one hostile country that has taken advantage of the open border. We have Cubans and Venezuelans coming in as well. Not to mention ISIS sympathizers.
Home-grown extremists have been a part of U.S. history, including the bombing of Wall Street in 1920. The blast killed 40 people immediately, and seriously injured another 143. In the 1960s, there were radicals who engaged in bombing campaigns across the U.S. and according to undercover agentLarry Grathwohl, they had plans to eliminate as many as 25 million Americans if they came to power.
One could speculate how a coup would work. Could, for example, revolutionaries destroy infrastructure, such as our electric system, or sabotage enough military defenses to help an invading army? That’s certainly a question worth pondering.
A final question is: Why did our government open the borders? In the first hours of Biden’s presidency, he acted to halt construction of Trump’s border wall. Later he issued an executive order ending the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program.
The most moderate explanation that I’ve heard was that he wanted more Democrat voters. In support of this explanation, in a 2024 interview, Kari Lake told Maria Bartiromo that “in every state around the country, you’re seeing Democrats fight tooth and nail any piece of legislation which will prevent illegals from voting.”
If this is true, then the dangers to national security that come with the flood of illegals might be minimized in the minds of the people who have opened our borders. There are, of course, more radical possible explanations.
Whatever the motives of our leaders, a power-grab by people who do not believe in democracy is increasingly becoming a possibility.
